Russian businessman Berezkin one of special treasury bond masterminds: Kremlin

[December 29, 2017]  MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian businessman Grigory Berezkin was among those who floated the idea of issuing a special treasury bond to repatriate funds back to Russia to mitigate against the risk of new U.S. sanctions, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday.

Sources told Reuters on Thursday that initial bids for the Russian sovereign Eurobonds, which have special conditions for wealthy Russians and are due to be issued next year, had come in at $200 million, but that demand already topped $3 billion.

One of the Reuters sources said that the adjusted Eurobonds had been nicknamed 'Beryozki', after the oligarch Berezkin, who the source said was a driver behind the original proposal to launch a special treasury bond.

(Reporting by Denis Pinchuk and Gabrielle Tetrault-Farber; Writing by Katya Golubkova; Editing by Andrew Osborn)

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